Speaker
Alessandro Grelli
(University of Utrecht (NL))
Description
Hadrons containing heavy flavours are unique probes of the properties of the hot and dense QCD medium produced in heavy ion collisions. Due to their large masses, heavy quarks are produced at the initial stage of the collision, almost exclusively via hard partonic scattering processes. Therefore, they are expected to experience the full collision history propagating through and interacting with the QCD medium. The parton energy loss, which is sensitive to the transport coefficients of the produced medium, can be studied experimentally by measuring the nuclear modification factor (R$_{AA}$) which accounts for the modification of the heavy flavoured hadron yield in Pb-Pb with respect to pp. In semi-central collisions, the degree of thermalization of charm quarks in the QCD medium can be accessed via the measurement of the heavy flavour elliptic flow $v_2$ at low p$_T$. At high p$_T$, $v_2$ is sensitive to the path length dependence of heavy quark in-medium energy loss.
The ALICE collaboration has measured the production of open heavy flavour hadrons via their hadronic and semi-leptonic decays at mid-rapidity and in the semi-muonic decay channel at forward rapidity in pp and Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 7 and 2.76 TeV and at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV respectively. In this talk the latest results on open heavy flavour R$_{AA}$ and $v_2$ will be presented.
Primary author
Alessandro Grelli
(University of Utrecht (NL))
